Black Mountain Honey: Let's Talk Bees With Laurence Edwards - Episode 9
Beekeeper Laurence Edwards answers viewer questions on splits, queen rearing, disease prevention, and hive setup. He recommends the walk-away split method, hardwood hives without landing boards, and a queen-rearing system that skips incubators. He advises moving colonies in cold weather to avoid drift and quarantining swarms collected from the field.
Chapters
Hello, I think I'm live. I'm trying this in a new area of my room, so if people could let me know if you can hear me, that would be fantastic. And hopefully it's not too stuttery either. If it is, we might have to go back over to the video over there. So hello, thanks everyone. This is episode 1 of questions and answers. I've had so many people messaging me in asking me questions, and I thought I would try and do this as regularly as I possibly can. So it might do it weekly, more likely I'm going to do it fortnightly. You will see in the description of the video there is a link where you can ask me a question. Makes it so much easier if you actually put it in that link, and then I can get a big list of questions that I can go away and answer. Probably looking around doing maybe an hour today, that's what I'm going to aim for. And yeah, let's get straight into it then. So I've got my tablet down here, I'm going to get the stream up here so I'll be able to look at your comments. So if you see me looking down, I'm having a read, seeing what's going on. So let's get into it. As I said, if someone could just confirm that they can actually hear me, that would be really good. I can see a couple of comments coming in. So hi Brad, Lucas, it's good to see the Aussies here. This is strictly no cricket, uh, chat allowed here at all, um, but you are allowed to talk about Arsenal, that is fine. Okay, people have confirmed they can hear me. That's excellent. Right, so I'm going to jump straight in with the questions, and feel free to put the questions in the chat. I will ask— I will answer the questions in the chat as well. That's no problem at all. But I am going to work my way through the questions that people have sent in first. So first one is from Robert Stagg, and he says, when painting the underfloor entrance hive from your video, what would you paint the landing board with? So I'm gonna go off on a massive tangent first and say I wouldn't have a landing board. I hate landing boards, like they're my number one pet hate when it comes to beekeeping. However, I appreciate that you're never going to get a perfect beehive in beekeeping, and everybody has different hives to kind of suit their different beekeeping style. So I'm not going to say landing boards are rubbish, no one should have a landing board. If I had 2 or 3 colonies in my back garden, I'd have landing boards on all of them. Of course I would, because I want to sit there, I want to watch the bees coming in, little flight in, pollen baskets full, going into that landing board, and I want to watch them for as long as possible. The reason that I don't have landing boards is because when you're stacking the hives together to put them onto transport, it makes it very, very inefficient in terms of space. So for me, I don't have landing boards. So going back to the question, what was the suitable treatment that you would use for a landing board? It's a bit of a difficult one. So normally I would say for wooden hives, so for cedar hives or oak, if you're building hives out of oak for some reason, I wouldn't bother treating it at all. But when you're using landing boards, they're actually horizontal or kind of like partially horizontal as opposed to vertical, so you would need to put some sort of treatment on there. If you look at the long hive that I've got, they do this really well. I think this is so clever. So I bought a pine long hive from Hyde Hives, and every single piece of the hive is made of pine apart from the landing board, and the landing board is made specifically of oak. So my preference would be, if you're making it yourself, to use like a hardwood for the landing board, and then that way you don't have to treat it. If you are going to treat it, you need to try and find some sort of treatment that's going to allow water to sit on the surface. Otherwise it's going to get really knackered within the space of maybe like a few, a few months. So that would be my preference— don't treat it at all. And if you're going to build it, build it out of something that's going to be able to resist rot a little bit better than a softwood. I'm going on to the next question here, and I've realized it's really difficult to jump between the two, so we might have to tweak this slightly going forward. Right, next question. Really easy question. What are my plans for 2023? Um, I've not really sat down and thought about it. Someone asked me the other day, kind of, what's, what's your business plan? Have you detailed your business plan down for 2023 and onwards? And I thought, I kind of have it in my head, um, but I've not written it down. So I should, I should write it down. I did mention this on previous live streams though, my plans. I want to reduce my numbers down significantly, so I want to take like a 50% reduction in the number of colonies that I've got. I want to focus more on rearing queens. I want to focus more on improving the genetics that I've got. Um, I've bought— no one's asked a question about this yet, but in the Simon the Beekeeper sale, that was a pretty amazing sale, I did manage to get myself some jackets and some full suits. Um, I bought 12 of them. I bought 12 full Simon the Beekeeper suits, and I wasn't doing it to kind of say, well, I'm going to buy some suits here and I'm gonna flog them on eBay and make £20 a suit. Definitely not going to do that. So if you see them being flogged on eBay, I promise you it's not me, and there is genuinely no hint of sarcasm there. But what I'm buying them for is that I do plan at some point, probably not this year, to do some kind of introduction to beekeeping courses, maybe do some specialist queen rearing courses as well. So I'm going to have a go at bringing people into a designated apiary and teaching them about beekeeping. But it'll be, it'll be a little bit more informal than that. It's not going to be like a classroom exercise. It's going to be more, come and let's have a bit of fun, learn about the bees, have some food. Definitely going to revolve around food, so I'll have to get the Komodo Joe there or something as well. But that is maybe not planned for 2023, but that is definitely a plan going forward. Just realized my tablet keeps on timing out, which is very annoying. Right, let's have a look at some other questions. Right, next question is, hello, I'm a beekeeper who got a hive of bees end of August last year. This year I want to do a split or 2 to increase my hives. However, I don't have any frames with drawn comb, only foundation available. Can you advise how to go forward with this? So first thing I'm going to do is get a tea. I seem to break records on this each time. I have a nice hot cup of tea at the beginning of every single stream, and I probably get through like a sixth of it and then drinking cold tea for the rest of the stream. So I'm going to do my best to try and drink my tea before it gets cold. Right, so making, making splits early in the season. And there's another question on this as well, which is what is the easiest way to make a split early in the season? So I'm going to combine both of those questions as best as I possibly can. First one is do not worry that you've not got drawn comb. That makes no difference to making splits whatsoever. If anything, I would say for people in the first couple of years, it makes it a little bit easier because the bees aren't going to accelerate through that drawn comb and kind of get towards swarming a lot easier. When you're making these splits early on in the year though, all I would say is you do just take your time when you're doing it. Don't try and push forward as quick as you possibly can because it's detrimental to the colonies. So let's take an example. We've got a colony, national deep, over say 11 frames, and they're building up and they're on like 6 or 7 frames, and you're thinking, right, I want to go ahead and make my split. I would recommend not making your split over 6 or 7 frames. In fact, the best way that I would make a split is I would get an additional brood box, so same size as the one that you've got, Fill it with foundation. Makes it really, really easy to do this with foundation. Put that on top of the 7 or 8 frames. You want to work upon the rule that when you're 80% complete or full in the box below, that's when you're going to put your next box on. So what you will have now is 2 National Deep boxes. The bottom one will have all your brood, 7 or 8 frames of brood, all of the bees, and then the top one will be full, completely full of just drawn foundation. And at that point I would add a feeder, so add 1:1 sugar syrup, get the bees going up through that additional box, and then I would just keep on feeding them until all of that top box is completely drawn out. What that's going to do is it's going to give you the benefit of drawing out all of that foundation so you get lots of nice drawn combs, and it's going to really stimulate that queen to go ahead and lay as many frames of eggs as she possibly can early on in the season. When I say early on in the season, I would be targeting doing that towards the end of April, but your bees will dictate as to when you're actually going to put that additional box on. The rule of thumb is 80%, and then once you've got them to a point where they're filling both of those boxes— and you do want to err on the side of caution here, don't leave them until they're completely jam-packed, you want to go when that top box is maybe 80 or 90% full— then you can just go ahead and make a split And I would always say making splits in a different apiary makes it so much easier. However, not everyone can make a split in a different apiary. But for the purpose of this Q&A, I'll do it in a different apiary. So I'll take the box and I would do a walkaway split. So walkaway split is the easiest thing in the world. It is, you've got 2 boxes on one hive and you split it into 2. You don't find the queen, you spread the brood evenly between the 2 boxes. Take one to one site and take one to another site, or leave one on the existing site. 8 days later, go back in and you'll find one colony's got a queen in it and the other one has got emergency queen cells. So if you want to go the cheapest route, on the colony that's got the queen in it, that one's done and you can just continue with that colony as normal. The other one, you knock down every single queen cell, barring preferably an open cell that you can look inside and see the larva. And then let them requeen naturally. I wouldn't do that because it's a bit risky, especially if you've only got one hive. You're putting all your eggs in the basket of that one queen, that one larva getting kind of through the full reproductive cycle and then coming out and getting mated. So for me, I would take down all of the emergency cells and I would add a mated queen in at that point. But a lot of people do get good results from walkaway splits, so you can do it one way or the other. That is how I would do the simplest early season split. Right, we've gone to the next question. Sorry if I'm ignoring people on the chat here, I've not mastered this yet, so I'm going to have to kind of get like another screen up here to look at. I'm doing it this way because it's a little bit better with the lighting. June said that was her question, thank you, enjoy your tea. That's a good reminder to have a little sip of tea. Right, I should mention people's names. So Arwell says, what time of year is best to transport bees to a different apiary? And the easiest way, considering I've only got a small car. So you could not really get a better time of year, I'd say, than now, like this week, today, tomorrow, because it's pretty cold at the moment. You're looking for at some point over winter where you can get your car in, you can get good access to it, and somewhere where there's going to be a nice cold snap. And what the benefit of doing that at this point of the year is that you can— you don't have to take into account the 3-foot or 3-mile rule. So I've got colonies that are kind of like 100 meters— I'm pointing and you can't see that I'm pointing— 100 meters behind the camera there. And I want to move them, say, 100 meters behind the camera the other way. I can do that at this point of the year, and I might get a little bit of drift back, but the bees aren't flying at this point of year, so they kind of don't know where they live. And you'll notice this at the beginning of the year, you'll get like a really warm day and you'll see loads of bees orientating back to the hive. And that is all of the young bees that don't know where they live, but it's also all of the old bees that have kind of forgotten where they live as well. So now, if you're going to move apiaries, do it now. If not, you can do it at any point in the year. Just wait until it gets dark and all of the bees are in the hive, and then you can just put like a foam bung in, put it in the back of the car, and if it's only a small car, you might just need to make like 2 or 3 trips. And then move them, and as long as you're moving them over 3 miles, you can just keep on moving them back and forth, and there's no skill in it whatsoever. You can just keep on moving them. A little tip and a little trick that I always use though is if you're moving multiple colonies and you don't want to do it in the middle of the night, if you leave a couple of colonies back on that original site that you're moving them away from, all of the bees will find their way into the existing hive that you leave in position. So for example, if you've got 12 colonies on a site and you go there in the middle of the day and take 10 of them away, all of the flying bees are going to come back and say, where's my hive gone, looking around the place, and they'll just go into any hive that's there. They're not just going to cluster up outside their existing location, or at least most of them won't. You will get a few that are quite persistent to try and go back, but you'll get the majority of them in, and then you can just go back at night and collect the last 2. So that's generally how I do that. Next question from Rob is, if you were going back to your earlier days in beekeeping when catching swarms was a good way of increasing colonies for you, would you automatically requeen if the queen was not marked, or would you wait and see how they all turned out? And would I still advise the same approach now? So no, I definitely wouldn't do that because for me the bigger risk in going and collecting swarms is the disease risk. So it's AFB, it's EFB, and I'm so scared of that now. Like, I feel genuinely wounded by that. So I would always just put that caveat in there whenever you're doing swarm collection. Make sure you're putting them on brand new clean equipment, nothing used, nothing— everything new. And make sure that you're putting it in a proper thorough quarantine apiary. And even more than that, when you're going and collecting them, make sure you're using disposable gloves, clean your hive tool, clean your bee suit, clean everything, clean the car, no risks when it comes to swarms. But I think the, the fun thing for me is, is finding out like what's there, what the genetics like of that queen. Um, and around here you don't, you don't tend to find too many like astonishing swarms and you're like, wow, that's a really good swarm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep that queen, or I'm gonna use that queen to try and breed from. I've never found that, but I do think it's quite interesting and quite fun. My favourite thing is finding— is catching a swarm with a marked queen. I do, that is my absolute favourite because then it's genuinely a really good queen. So I like finding them if they're marked, but regardless, for me, I don't— if they are marked or if they aren't marked, I'll always give them a season. I'm not going to go in and start doing anything messing around with the queens because I'll just leave them to build up. I'm going to leave them kind of like 6 weeks anyway in a quarantine apiary, at least I would if I was collecting them anymore, to assess for disease. So I definitely wouldn't be changing the queens out then, and then I just let them overwinter. I give them a chance at overwintering. You could argue, and I'd say from my experience, that the swarms that do overwinter, as in they go into winter, don't perform anywhere near as well as the ones that have other queens in there of known genetics, and they don't come through the winter as well. So you could argue by putting a queen in you're going to maximize your returns on the number of queens that you're getting through the winter. I've just seen a couple of people hit the like button. If you do enjoy these streams at any point, do hit the like button, really does help with the channel. Right, next question. Um, I said next question is from Lawrence Edwards, it's just that I wrote it on there. So if anyone does want to ask a question, you can put it in the chat. I will go through the chat in a little bit. If you want to ask a question for future videos though, there is that link, so stick it in that link and then you'll get at the very beginning of the live streams before I start filtering through all of the comments. So the question is, have I ever tried using a solar wax melter? And the person who sent it is living in Scotland and saying maybe it's not going to be so effective up there. So yes, I have used a solar wax melter, and yes, they are incredibly efficient. They're really, really good, and they would definitely work up in Scotland. So all I would say though is that solar wax melter is not the kind of thing that's going to work like 120 days of the year. Pick your days when you're going to use your solar wax melter, and anything up to maybe like 10 or 20 colonies, you'll be amazed at the throughput that you get on like 1 or 2 days of the year. So you think back to last summer, you've got like some days here where it was like 35, 36 degrees, not a cloud in the sky all day. It was hot from 7 AM in the morning through to like 8, 9 PM at night. Once you get that solar wax melter up to temperature you'll be amazed at how quickly it starts putting through really nice clean filtered wax, and you can just keep on going, keep on refilling it, and it works so, so well. So it's not the kind of thing that's going to work every single day, but it is something that on a specific day of the year, regardless of where you are in the UK, is going to be very, very effective. Now I've used 2 solar wax melters, one that I built myself that cost me nothing and was a bit— wasn't rubbish, but it was a bit hard work to use and a little bit messy. But the other one I did, I did have one from Abello, and I'm not doing that as a shameless plug for Abello, but it was good. And I know another— a number of other companies do similar ones where they are built quite well. And for me, I just prefer to buy something that's going to work well. However, I know that I've got rubbish DIY skills And I've seen some of the other ones that people have built using kind of like double or triple glass and then fully insulating it and putting the filters in, and they are so effective. So definitely have a go at doing it. Wish I had more time to play around more with solar wax melters and stuff like that because they are good fun, but definitely have a go in Scotland. Uh, right, Linda Brooks says, I'm in my first year of beekeeping with just one colony. If my bees make it to spring, what is the easiest, least nerve-wracking way to do a split? So I kind of answered that one before. Um, I'll refer you back to the beginning of the video. I'd build them up, double brood them, get them as big as possible, and then make a split, as opposed to trying to doing it when they're too small. And if it's your only colony, just get a mated queen. Get a mated queen from anywhere. Don't have to buy it from us. We do sell mated queens, but get one from anywhere. It's going to make it so much easier, and it's going to really increase the percentage chance of you getting 2 colonies out of your one colony. as opposed to getting one smaller colony and one failed split, which is really annoying if you've only got one colony. Right, final question. So I'm flying through it, 18 minutes in, we're doing well. From Graham Thomas saying, hi Laurence, having lost 2 hives in the summer, I'm overwintering just a single colony. I'd like to build back up to the original 3 this year. What would be the best way to do it without sacrificing too much of a honey crop? So I know that's a very similar question to the other ones, and I did answer it before, but the one that I just want to include in there, the final pieces Wouldn't worry too much about sacrificing a honey crop if you're taking like a single colony and splitting it into 2. I always refer back to Rob Tallis. He's the perfect example of this, where if you take a 6-frame overwintered nuc in the middle of April and you build that colony up— and the massive caveat, you don't lose a swarm— and you just build it up and up and up and up, he had that on double brood and 7 supers full, and that was from a 6-frame nuc in April. So okay, you might need to scale that back a little bit, but if you've got a big strong colony coming out of winter, you should get to the point where towards the end of April, if you're using mated queen, you're going to have 2 6-frame splits. So you have the capacity and the capability within that nuc to get a monster honey crop. If you're going to take one colony and build it up and split it into 10 nucs, you're not going to get so much of a honey crop. Um, so I would— you, you can do it either way. I wouldn't worry too much about that. top like that. Right, that's all of the questions that I've got here, so I'm going to go back through now and have a look on some of the comments and try and find out where they are. Right, so I'll start at the top. Hi, please can you tell when you start to do a demerara colony, maybe if they start to build queen cups or if they have 6 or 7 brood frames, when's the best time? So for me, a demerite is always a proactive split. What— it doesn't work for me as a reactive split. Like, it's just— you might as well just take a split and split the colony and merge them again later on. So I always do it as a proactive split, which means I definitely don't wait for any queen cups. If there's queen cells there, if they started making swarm cells, you've got no chance. Doing a demerite will not stop them swarming. They're just going to go because the impulse is already there. And the reason that I like it so much as a proactive method is that it means that you can go to an apiary, so say you've got 12 hives at an apiary, you can get yourself 12 new boxes or 12 cleaned boxes all full of foundation, mixture of foundation and drawn comb, however you're going to do it, and you can go to this apiary that's got 12 in, they're all going to build up at roughly the same speed, and you can just do your proactive demarays on all of them at once. Becomes a very efficient way of managing your bees. Whereas if you flip that over and do it in the reverse and you're looking to do it as a reactive method, you kind of almost need to either go to the apiary and then work out which ones you need to do it to and then go back to your stores and get your equipment, or you just need to carry around loads of equipment with you all the time on the off chance that some colonies are making swarm preps. So for me, it's far more effective doing it as a proactive split and also makes my life so much easier. Southern Best Honey says, I have more honey than I can sell in jars, so I have to sell it in bulk, but I don't know honey packers or honey processors. Can you recommend some? So I'm guessing you're not UK-based, and if you were UK-based, I'd probably struggle to answer the question anyway. But it's a difficult question to answer, and I think many people will go about that in a slightly different way. For me, I think the best way to try and drive your sales is through the jar sales, but that is just me. I appreciate that's not going to work for someone who's harvesting honey from thousands of colonies, it's never going to work like that. So it's a slightly difficult question to answer. I would— it'd be good to have like a chat about it because I'd like to understand kind of do other people in the same area have the same struggle. For us, the social media side definitely helps kind of educating people as to what honey's about and showing them pictures of bees and doing YouTube, that definitely helps and drives interest in your product. But yes, it's quite a challenging question to answer that one. If I was sitting there with buckets of honey, and I'm assuming this is kind of in the US as well, I'm not sure what I would do. I'm going to park that question, I might come back to it. Uh, Mem says, hi, just bought a pine beehive from Simon the Beekeeper. What's the best treatment? So any pine hives that I've had, they do deteriorate far quicker than cedar hives, but I would go with a proper painting system on them. So sand them down, good quality primer, good quality exterior gloss, give it a couple of coats, get it on nice and thick, and then you're kind of going into like that regime I've just realized that I've missed Joe's question. I don't know why I get that. I'll come back to your question, Joe. With pine, you need to make sure that it's not a paint-it-and-forget-it system. You need to come back in, and you need to kind of continually make sure that you're topping up that painting system. I've just seen that Kushtim said to forget my coffee or tea, so I will have a sip. But that's the big one with pine. I've got a couple of pine hives, and you can really see the deterioration coming in. So you need to be on top of it, like, it sounds bad, almost on a yearly basis, going back, sanding it down, topping it back up, maybe even back to primer level if you need to. My personal advice, do not touch pine beekeeping equipment, just for me, and that is very specific advice for the UK. So I don't like— in the US it's going to be different, if you're in like a warmer climate it's going to be different, but pine does not do well in, in the soggy uplands of North Wales deteriorates very quickly. I don't know how I missed your question, Joe. It is here, right? Joe Crease's question is, what's the easiest method of queen rearing for the hobbyist beekeeper with 10 to 20 hives? And then the second bit is, do you need an incubator, or can you use your starter colony and then split them into the nucs as the finisher and let them all get on with it? So definitely do not need an incubator. Without a shadow of a doubt, you do not need a transportable incubator, and you do not need an at-home incubator. You can leave your colonies to do it. I would— for 10 to 20 colonies, I would just do it very, very simple. Get your starter colony set up in the method that I use, which is the method that Richard Nowell uses as well. Really good quality method to get the bees fed on royal jelly very, very quickly. And then for me, I just would break up that starter colony into your finisher colonies, as opposed to having a rolling starter colony. And I know there's tons of different methods on this, and I know another beekeeper— and I'm going to go down and do a couple of videos with him this year— that does a really good queen right method. Um, oh, Southern Best Honey, that's amazing! £5 token, much appreciated, thank you very much. Um, but he does, he does this different queen right method which could be used on a smaller scale, although he uses it on quite a big scale. But my method that I use, I use a starter method, a starter colony, and then I'll run like a couple of rounds, maybe 3 rounds of starter larva through that, and then I'll put them into finisher colonies. So when I'm building this starter colony, you've seen it before, you do the 10 over 10 method, Michael Palmer method, and you're putting all of that brood in there to give you a box, ultimately a box of 10 frames that is completely jam-packed full of brood in all stages, but preferably emerging brood. And after a certain amount of time, you get a huge, huge amount of young, young bees, which is what you want to feed the larva royal jelly. Now, if I only had 10 or 20 colonies, all I would do is I would just make that starter colony in exactly the same way But then when I come to make the splits and when I come to move the larva on, I would just break that colony back up again. I'd probably go and take it to a different apiary as well, and then I would move the, the starter larvae. So my queen cups that have just got larva in, and you can see that the bees have accepted them because they've started to draw them down, I would divide my queen cells and my queen cups between the splits that I've made from my starter colonies. Really effective and a really efficient use of all of your bees, because what you'll end up doing— say for example you've got a colony, um, sorry, say for example you've got an apiary, it's got 10 colonies of bees in it, and you've gone through and you've built up your starter colony by going and taking 2 frames of brood from each and every single colony within that apiary. So then you've got a starter colony, it's got 20 frames of brood. All you're going to do then is once you've got the bees to start your cells, you're just going to break it back up again, and you could break it back up into 10 splits. So you could go as small as that, or you could break it back down. I'd probably go to 5 splits with the 4 frames in each and add a couple of frames of foundation in there. That's a really, really efficient way of doing it, and it means that you're giving them— you're turning your 10 colonies— you're not taking too much resource away from your 10 colonies. You're turning it into 5 or 10 splits. And then each cycle is kind of completely enclosed, and you're not reliant on other colonies. That's the method I would use. I have to remember to have another sip. Right, I'm working my way through. Right, Carl Bat says, "Hi Lawrence, what hive would you buy if you were starting all over again?" Ask a question. It changes. So. If you'd have asked me that a couple of years ago, it would have definitely been some form of poly hive. If you were asking me it maybe a year ago, it would have been the 12-frame poly national from Abello, which I really do like, but it's quite expensive. What I would do now—I'll keep it quick because I have mentioned this on other live streams—I would build my own underfloor entrance as a floor. I would buy cedar seconds in the sale. For my national brood box, all of my supers would be exactly the same, so I'd have a single size box to keep all of my bees in. I would then— polyashworth feeder, because it's so versatile. You can use it for feeding syrup, you can use it for upturned feeding fondant, you can use it as a crown board, and it gives you really good insulation. And then I would probably make or buy a cheap makeshift roof. Um, I think that's a real perfect beehive. And it's cheap as well, much, much cheaper than buying kind of hives complete in their kit form. Right, so next one, Melanie says, I have an apiary that borders a field that will be OSR in the spring, similar last year. I split the hives 15th of April and all swarmed, including the splits, by the 9th of May. How would you tackle it this year? Right, that's not good. So my question would be, when you did the splits, did you knock down all of the cells? Because if you make kind of like an emergency split, or you make a split and they make emergency cells, and you don't get every single one of them. They will— they can sometimes fly with the virgins. I would definitely question the amount of space that they had as well. So oilseed rape comes in so quickly, like so incredibly quickly, that they can just backfill the brood box really quickly. So if you've got colonies that are coming through the winter that have got excessive stores, I would see if you can get as much foundation as you possibly can into the brood area prior to the oilseed rape flows coming on, um, without them starving. That's the balance here, because then what they're going to do is they're going to bring those stores down, and instead of just storing it and clogging up and backfilling the brood nest, what they're going to do is they're going to start kind of building out and drawing out that foundation. Gives them something to do. Mm-hmm. And then once they've got that foundation that's drawn out down there, the queen will lay in there as well, boost the size of the colony. and hopefully means that you won't trigger swarming early. I would say though, if you've done preemptive splits and they all swarmed by the 9th of May, there's something— there's a bit of foul play going on there in terms of you've either missed some swarm cells or the brood boxes are clogged up with old seed, right? So that's what I'd go for. I'm just looking at the screen resolution down there, it's rubbish. I'm going to change the camera around next time and do it a different way. very disappointed with screen resolution, so sorry about that. It will be better next time. Ted O'Neill says, where do I get my foundation from now? So it's Thorn now, really, is the way I do it, because I do have a good chunk of wax to trade in, and they're relatively good with the trading, and I do like their wax. I did previously use Simon the Beekeeper, which was good. I enjoyed their wax as well. All right, next question is from Adam Golding, says, hi Lawrence, what would you say is the minimum distance for a quarantine apiary from your normal apiaries? As far as you can possibly get it, in the middle of nowhere, like 5 miles away. You're going to be next to someone else's apiary, but just as far as you can possibly get it. And also, just like I said, just go through that cleaning regime. Sounds overkill, but you'll be amazed that, you know, the colonies that tend to swarm, the wild colonies, are the colonies that are not tended to very well. And they're also the colonies that are more likely, because they're not tended to well by experienced beekeepers, they're more likely to have EFB. I'd love to see some real live stats showing just how much EFB and AFB is spread through swarming and also through deadouts. I mentioned this previously, deadouts are like one of the biggest risks to beekeepers. So you've got, again, I used to use the same example, if you've got 10 colonies in a single apiary, and you're, you're not very proactive in the beginning of the year of going and closing up the deadouts, and a colony dies— and the colonies that have got EFB, the colonies who've got AFB, are definitely more likely to die— and then all of your colonies kind of cotton on to that and say, well, there's a dead colony there, loads of honey in it, and they just go and rob it out. It's so easy to spread that one dead EFB or AFB-infected colony to all of the rest of the colonies in your apiary, and then they could go and fly and chase the swarms out as well. So it's a plea to people, if you find that your colony is dead, you find a colony that's dead over winter, first thing you need to do is make it safe so that all of your other bees and colonies can't get their way in, can't make their way into that colony. That buys you time. And then what you need to do is just burn everything in it. It's exactly what we do now. And it seems like it kind of seems a bit like, um, like a waste of time and a waste of resource. And I'm not saying to— I'm not saying to burn the hives. Like, you can, you can take the hives down, you can, you can scorch the hives, but burn the frames, burn the honey. Don't go and just make splits with the honey. I've done that when I was first beekeeping. I kind of thought, oh, you know what, it's a queen failure, there's a perfectly good frame of stores there, I'm going to use that frame of stores. Or there's a perfectly good frame of Drawn-out comb there. Drawn-out comb is more valuable than foundation, so I'm going to take that drawn-out comb that I don't know whether there's any sort of disease on that comb, and I'm just going to make a split with it. And I was so naive. So it is my plea to people is just don't do that. Burn the frames, burn all of the frames. It really isn't worth it. Take all of the equipment. If it's poly, clean it in bleach. If it's wood, scorch it down. You can reuse it again. I've done videos showing both of those processes. You're probably giving up 15 to 20% of the value of what's there, and it will pay you back 10 times over because you're not going to be spreading disease around. Um, so James Knoll says, do I make propolis tincture? So I have a good agreement with someone actually where he makes my propolis tincture for me now. It's great, and he sends it to me in these buckets, and it is thick and it is gloopy. But I have made my own propolis tincture as well. It was quite good fun making it, and I do actually try and regularly kind of, you know, just have like a drop or two if I've got a bit of a tickly throat or a sore cold. Um, but all you use— use— we did this before— use like an 85% proof alcohol, and then you just put the propolis in and stir it up and then sieve it out, and it's very, very simple. But I do— I like my propolis tincture. I'm definitely going to do a video. That's not the first time I've asked that question or been asked that question. Uh, Alan Blanton says, when am I due to start my queen rearing operation? So we generally go when the colonies start doing like a full, or maybe like 75% full, um, batch of drones naturally. So when the bees start creating drones, I want to be there setting up my starter colonies, and that's generally around like first, second week of May here. And then if you look all the way through they come out roughly around like first, second week of June to have a queen that's done like a single round of brood. But let the bees tell you, so it doesn't matter where you are across the whole world, let the bees tell you when it's good to start doing queen rearing, and that is when they're producing naturally occurring drones within the hive. I haven't watched all your videos yet, Need to get— need to get looking, Brad. But have you worked Warré or Kenyan top bar hives? Never know how to say that. So many people call it different, like Warré, Warré, War. Um, you can tell I don't know how to say it. Uh, but the easy answer to that is no, I've not done either. And it's probably one that I will have a go on because they do look quite cool. So I might, I might do a series on both of those. Saves me trying to say it again. Lawrence, is there a quick way to build cedar hives? I have made a few now and it seems to take me ages. I wish there was a quick way to build them. You know, the National hive is such an awkward hive to build because you need to try and get everything square, and you're constantly there with your little measure making sure that you're maintaining the correct bee space. Top tip is don't use Nationals. Langstroth are way, way easier to build, and Langstroth are way, way easier to build like yourself, especially if you've got access to good, good quality timber. They're so simple. You just get a jig and it's just like finger joints and really, really easy to build from scratch. But building nationals in a kit form, I guess my tips would be what I always have is like 10 or 11 frames made up, and I make them up like completely made up, glued and nailed. You don't have to glue them, but I do like to glue them now because some of my other ones are falling apart. And then when you're putting it together put those 10 or 11 frames actually in within the national hive, and then I just find that helps make it a lot quicker in terms of like leveling it up and making sure that everything's flush on the top. Nail gun helps if you want to get yourself like an 18-gauge nailer, that does help. And the boxes that I have, I find the ones where I've used the nailer, they do, they do very, very well. And you can stick a few nails in. I like to use like a I don't know what they're called, they're like brads, so they've not got like a big head and you can just stick a few in and then I just like, I slap on so much glue, have a wet rag with me and I'm just wiping off all the glue. But there's no, there's no real quick way to do it. The nicest tip that I would give is that if you measure from corner to corner on both sides and they equal each other, it's square. That's a really good tip, means that you don't have to like get your set squares out and try and measure all the corners. So just measure from corner to corner. If they equal the same, it is completely square. But apart from that, no, it is a little bit slow, I'm afraid. Um, Dee said your queen rearing answer was very confusing for a novice. Look to do a 1-2-3 type list of actions perhaps. So apologies if it was a bit confusing. Yeah, I do rumble on, I do talk quite quickly. What I would say though is that by far and away it's going to be a lot easier for you to watch it on a video. So there is a video for that, um, how to rear queen bees, I think it is, if you search the channel. And there's like a 35-minute video showing you all the steps you need to know. So I'll just follow that video. And then the only difference from that video in terms of my answer was I don't— I wouldn't use a finisher. I would split the starter colony up see in the video, and I would just use that to finish the, finish the queens off. Um, that would be the only change that I would make to that video. I appreciate it'd be difficult to follow it just on a live stream. Hopefully the video helps. If it doesn't, then I, I may be doing, uh, an easier guide to queen rearing on a smaller scale, and I will add that to the list as well. That's a good video for me to do, which is queen rearing for like 10 to 20 hives. Uh, Joe Creasy says, how long can you store the propolis tincture? I'd say indefinitely. I've had some for years. It's in such a high level of alcohol that I don't think it'll ever go off. Uh, says, it was a touch behind on the OA vape treatment on 5 hives due to apply the 3rd one when this cold snap hit at the beginning of the week. Would you say to start again or just leave it and monitor in the spring? I would just go as soon as you get the next next kind of reasonable snap of weather, maybe like 8 or 9 degrees is a good one. As soon as you start getting into double figures and the bees are flying, it becomes a bit too warm. When it's 3 or 4 degrees, it is too cold. It's not really going to be very effective. Brad's just told me it's Warré. Okay, Warré hive, that's very good. I'll remember that. But in terms of the OA, I would definitely go again and do another stint It's not ideal doing it 7 or 8 days after the next one, but it will still give you a good drop on any phoretic mites. So just wait for it to warm up a little bit, and I would go again. What is the background buzzing audio coming in with the live feed? I wasn't aware of that. If there is some background buzzing, can anyone confirm if there is background buzzing? Sorry, sorry if there is. Maybe it's because I'm watching the stream down here, there might be interference. If someone can confirm, that'd be good. Hey, and I'm down, I'm down to the bottom of the comments. This is great. So I'm nearly there. I'm not going to go on for long because I am going to do these every week, try and do them every week. Right, Joe's saying it's my iPad, right? So let me try, let me try turning off the iPad, see if that works. Is that any better? I can't see the comments now, I'll have to look at it on the screen. If someone can confirm, that could be good. If not, there is another one, another thing that I could try. Right, I've turned off the phone bank as well now. Is that any better? I think it might just be my phone. Hopefully it's not too off-putting. Oh yeah, my phone is on vibrate. Okay, I'll turn my phone off. That's a really good one. There we go, simple as that. Just turn my phone off vibrate, that'd be it. Okay, so I'm completely on my phone now, so I can only see the comments come up as they come in. I think that was all the questions that were there. Have I ever heard of invasive Argentine ants spreading deformed wing virus? Possibly the best question I've ever had, and unfortunately no, but I don't know, that's a really good question and way beyond my level of knowledge. So no, I've not heard of that, but it kind of sounds pretty cool. Argentine invasive ants, wow. Right, Amateur Radio on the Air says, will the government's plan to ban the use of polystyrene for food products affect beekeeping? Sorry, I missed that question before, so thanks for asking it again. I don't think it will affect beekeeping, but I would definitely say what a great initiative. Like, plastic products like that definitely need to be banned. And there's a strange thing with beekeeping in terms of— I was looking at this the other day and I got asked the question, have I got a sustainability plan? And I kind of think, well, we do everything we possibly can to try and be as sustainable as we possibly can be. And then I think, well, you know, we're using glass jars with metal lids and everything's recyclable. But then you trace it back and you think, you know what, glass, glass is probably like the least sustainable thing in the world. But then what do you, what do you change it out to? There's not really much that you can change it out to. I saw a company in America which was quite— sorry, a company in Australia which was quite cool, which was you buy the first jar of honey, and I guess you don't even need to buy the first jar of honey, and then the next one comes in like a cellulose something sort of wrapper that will last like maybe a couple of years, but then you just decant it out into your jar and then it will go on the food composting. So it won't compost and degrade naturally, but you can put it in with your food waste, which I thought was really good. So you could do something like that, but it would cost quite a lot of money. And then it comes back to the can you reuse the jars scenario. Asked that question so many times. Now I'd love to see like a circular economy with jars, and I'd love to see you being able to go into shops, local retailers, farm shops, and, you know, decant some honey out of a container. But honey just doesn't work like that. It, you know, it's just going to granulate. So you're going to be constantly heating this honey, and it's going to be a complete nightmare. But reusing jars for us is a definite no-no. We've never reused jars. I guess if you're using honey for your own personal use, it's fine, and I've family and friends, I still probably wouldn't advise reusing jars. It's up to them, but the Food Standards Agency definitely will not let you reuse jars regardless of what cleaning process you put them through. Simon G says, I need a new baseball bat for Under My Veil. Do you have any plans to sell branded merchandise? So I need to put that back on the shop. There was a link underneath a lot of the videos that sold branded merchandise. So I will put that back up and we will see a few come through. So Ted O'Neill says sounds like a phone vibrating, right? So that's definitely not me now, that's something else. So I need to, I need to try and work out what that is. I'll have to watch it back on the live stream and see if I can pin it down. Um, I also need to work out on here how to see the comments. Here we go. Right, it's my, it's my notification of a comment coming in. Right, how do I turn that off? I'll have to work that out next time. Uh, Mish says, in the current company in the garage, can't wait to get some more queens. Thank you very much. It's like I planted that comment. I didn't, but I do, I do remember your name coming through buying a lot of queens, so thank you very much for that. Uh, Dee's saying it's stopped now, right? Okay, cool. It was my phone, so sorry about that. It's, uh, I'm trying to learn on a slightly new system here, and I will— I'll switch it around next time, and it's going to be like loads better because, uh, it won't be like a combination of about 4 pixels. So let me have a look. So I think, I think we're done, and I think I'm going to call it a day here as well. So I don't intend for these to be long streams. I'm just going to come in, answer all the questions that are sent on through that link I'll answer all the questions that come up on the chat, so I'll give you like a last minute or so to ask any final questions on the chat, and then I will call it a day. Thank you so much though to the people putting the questions in, much appreciated. I will do these weekly. I will change the kind of timings of them roughly. It'll either be a Friday evening, a Saturday evening, or kind of like a Saturday afternoon, but they will change around just as when I've got a little bit of space and time to do them. Oh, I just saw one question that came up there. We'll answer that last question. I definitely need a new system to do this, not on my phone though. Right, Damien says, if you buy equipment at the beekeeping show, do you need to be able to take it away with you the same day? Unfortunately, Damien, you do, and that is the reason that they offer it on a decent price, is that, uh, it's, it's cheaper for them to just bring it down in a big trailer as opposed to Delivering it to you. So Dee said I missed her EFB question, so sorry, Dee, can you just post that again and I will answer that? I'm struggling to read where the questions are on here a little bit, so we'll live and learn. Again, if you're enjoying these questions and you're enjoying the question and answer streams, do give it a thumbs up. Same goes for all of the videos, it's really helpful. Simon G says some advanced notification of the live streams is appreciated. So I try and give you as best as I possibly can advance notification. I do post it on like the Facebook No Nonsense group, um, I post it on Black Mountain Honey, and I'll post it on Twitter as well. So I'll post it across a few different areas, but it will never be kind of like 24-48 hours in advance because my life doesn't work like that, unfortunately. It's always a bit, bit manic, and I'm always doing things at the last minute, and then I get a little bit of spare time, and then I'll jump in, and I will come in and do a question and answer. But do, do click the link, do ask the questions. Any questions go. More than happy to talk about Arsenal because they are doing very, very well. But I think we're done. So thanks everyone for dialing in. Stick the questions on the link and I'll see you next time.
